If thou gazest long into the Pit, the Pit will also gaze into thee

Today is the Day of Hypatia (ca. AD 350–370 — March 415–416), probably an early atheist, “first well-documented woman in mathemathics” and teacher of philosophy and astronomy whose death at the hands of a Christian mob marked a moment in time when humanity took the wrong turn into the probably longest and darkest dead end of history. Her death was proposed as the end of classical antiquity.

Hypatia wrote:All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.
—attributed to her, unverified

She led the neoplatonic school in Alexandra that was committed to law and logic during a time when Christian religion and its intolerance was on the rise. In the years after Constantine (272—337), Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and soon after this pronouncement began harassing other faiths. Hypatia was caught up in a city wide feud that led to her death. As Christians would make it a habit, they stripped her naked and then killed her in a hideous way. Her Christian counter-part, Theophilus, the orthodox Pope of Alexandria foreshadowed in his character what was to come for human history. The 18th century historian Edward Gibbons described him 1776 as the "perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood."

Hypatia wrote:Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.
—attributed to her, unverified

In remembering Hypatia today "we remember the tragedy of the Christian destruction of classical learning, from which it can be argued the West did not recover for 1000 years. It is a sobering reminder to always be prepared to look again at history before assuming that things could not have gone another way" (Source).

[youtube]NEoI4V3thx8[/youtube]

More Sources:

• http://www.churchofvirus.org/wiki/StHypatia
• Some more background and historical context, unfortunately unsourced (sample checks were legit): http://www.mountainman.com.au/essenes/article_060.htm

I missed this when you posted it...

I remember I did my first school project on Hypatia.

Too bad the Rachel Weisz movie was such a disaster.